Applying NLP Technologies to the Collection and Enrichment of Language Data on the Web to Aid Linguistic Research

The field of linguistics has always been reliant on language data, since that is its principal object of study. One of the major obstacles that linguists encounter is finding data relevant to their research. In this paper, we propose a three-stage approach to help linguists find relevant data. First, language data embedded in existing linguistic scholarly discourse is collected and stored in a database. Second, the language data is automatically analyzed and enriched, and language profiles are created from the enriched data. Third, a search facility is provided to allow linguists to search the original data, the enriched data, and the language profiles in a variety of ways. This work demonstrates the benefits of using natural language processing technology to create resources and tools for linguistic research, allowing linguists to have easy access not only to language data embedded in existing linguistic papers, but also to automatically generated language profiles for hundreds of languages.